Friday, April 08, 2011

UFO and abduction antecedents: The Betty Hill account

That there are precedents for flying saucers and alien abduction-medical procedures is a given.

Here are three, from just before the 1940s onslaught of UFO events:

From 1908

From 1935

From the 1930s

How memory clasps on to such images is covered in the psychological literature as you know. For instance, items seen or experienced, as those above, reside in memory and are recalled when associative material is suggested. The problem in retrieval is that a confluence of memory alters or distorts the attempted retrieval item, and it is remembered with all the (similar) accoutrements that have surrounded it over the years. [Psychology Today, CRM Books, Del Mar, California, 1970, Page 347 ff.]

...memory seems to evolve over time. Items [are] not lost or recovered at random. Rather, material that was more foreign to the subject, or lacked sequence, or wasstated in unfamiliar terms, [is] more likely to be lost or changed substantially in both syntax and meaning. [The hippocampus and declarative memory: cognitivemechanisms and neural codes by Howard Eichenbaum, 2001]

and is never accurate:

According to much of the recent psychological literature on memory, Bartlettshould be credited with the insight that remembering can never be accuratebut is, instead, more or less of a distortion. [MISREMEMBERING BARTLETT: A STUDY INSERIAL REPRODUCTION by James Ost and Alan Costall]

For example, here’s how we conjectured, early on at this blog (in the archived postings) Betty Hill’s “star map.”

We suggested that she recalled, under hypnosis, a map that hung in her place of employment. This is that map:

When she was hypnotized, she recalled and drew this now (infamous?) map:

Betty Hill grasped from her Long Term Memory, an image that meshed with the story she was endeavoring to relate.

Why the map at all? We surmise that Betty Hill has an associative attachment to the map, for some emotional reason, and brought it forward to assuage her feelings about what it represented.

Was Barney Hill in the service during WWII, or one of Betty Hill’s relatives? A father, a brother, an uncle, anyone with an emotional connection to Ms. Hill?

(We also suggest that Betty Hill saw the alien medical scenario above, which appeared in materials that she was said to read.)

This is all hypothetical cogitation on our part, but it is the kind of rumination that needs to be applied, more judiciously of course, to all UFO events, Roswell in particular.

This posting is an attempt to push (younger) bona fide researchers into a modus that gets the study of UFOs out of its laughable rut.